Relationship Between Electronic Sports-Game Live Commentators’ Professional Goals and Their Vocal and Speech Complaints

Objective: To provide the first survey of the Electronic Sports-Game Live Commentators’ professional goals and their vocal and speech complaints, once there is no scientific literature that caraterizes vocal and speech behaviors and complaints of these professionals.

Methods: The present research is a cross-sectional study, bringing a secondary, documental and retrospective data analysis of a private Speech-Therapy Clinic. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of a Public Brazilian University. The data were collected by a survey via Google Forms® between April/2021 to April/2022. The questionary was composed by 19 questions comprising the following domains: (1) personal identification, (2) broadcasting category, (3) professional vocal demand, (4) vocal complains, (5) speech behaviors, and (6) sleep boundaries.

Results: Were included on this study 100 survey responses. According to the analysis, the Electronic-Game Commentators are on average male gender (56%), mean age are 26 years old and they have college degree (69%).
On the participants, 46% were sportscasters, 29% correspondents, 8% analysts, 8% live streamers, 7% hosts, 1% general speaker. The professional function were statistically significant in regarding to vocal and speech complaints. The professional function/category having more vocal and speech complaints was the live streamer (mean 4,6), followed by host (mean 3,8), correspondent (mean 2,5) and sportscaster (mean 1,9). Regarding to vocal demand, the Commentators that have two or three Broadcasting per day or more than four per week presented the highest scores of speech (p=0,20) and general (p=0,002) complaints. The professionals who presented less sleep hours per night had more speech complaints (p=0,05). The ones under vocal and speech therapy reported less vocal symptoms comparing to the ones that wasn’t. Having a journalist or broadcaster certificate had no impact on the results.

Conclusion: On average, Electronic Sports-Game Live Commentators’ are male gender adults with college degree, even though the female gender professionals are expressive. Being a live streamer are the professional function with the highest speech complaints. The amount of days, times and the length of the Broadcasting, sleep boundaries and speech therapy providing are related to general and speech complaints.